Michael Paglia visits Robischon Gallery and Ironton Studios in this week’s review, taking in two solo shows to start out the summer season. The exhibit at Ironton focuses on work from Stephen Batura. At Robischon there are four solos on view that match up beautifully with Batura’s Ironton excursion as…
If you think summer movies are clamorous, try a current Broadway musical. Watching Jersey Boys on stage is like soldiering through some extreme eating contest where you’re force-fed dessert for three hours. It’s all falsetto heroics and hustled-through character drama, every beat of every scene over-scored, over-rehearsed, and overbearing. And…
For all of Fox News’s fear-mongering about Hollywood being out to indoctrinate us with liberal values, when it comes to pregnancy, the movies have for years been curiously conservative. If a woman gets knocked up, she either loses the baby by accident or carries it to term. Abortion, an option…
In 2012, advocates for marijuana legalization pushed Initiative 502 onto the ballot in Washington state. This year, director Riley Morton released the documentary Evergreen: The Road to Legalization, which chronicles the months leading up to the vote. In interviews with recreational and medical marijuana users, dealers and legislators, as well…
Prospero in The Tempest, now receiving a checkered production at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, rules over a magical island — magical in a way that only the Elizabethan imagination, which saw dragons and sea serpents inhabiting all unknown territories, could summon up. Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, but…
There’s a must-see exhibition at Ironton Gallery called Stephen Batura: Stream that features some very recent paintings assembled into a singular installation. In the ’90s, Batura was part of an upstart generation of emerging artists right out of school who were interested in doing work with representational imagery cast into…
Chris Richter. Back in March, gallery director Bobbi Walker realized that her planned June slot had come apart and that she needed to come up with somebody fast. At the time, she was checking out the scene in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and came across the work of painter Chris…
The Graduate. The more you think about it, the more you realize what a weak play The Graduate really is. Adapted for the stage by Terry Johnson from a 1960s novel by Charles Webb — which in turn became an iconic film starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft — it…
“Wherever you live in this world, basically…you are alone. Even if have support systems, we’re really alone.” Those words, shorn of sentimentality, are offered—and received—as motherly balm in the documentary When I Walk. Filmmaker Jason DaSilva, having turned his camera on himself to capture the ravaging effects of multiple sclerosis…
Ravenous is a film-shaped UFO: It’s so delightfully weird that its very existence defies logic. Imagine a film that makes A Modest Proposal–style satire out of Dracula’s gothic horror tropes in the spaghetti western milieu of The Great Silence. It’s a pitch-black comedy about Manifest Destiny and cannibal frontiersmen. Set…
The Rover, Australian filmmaker David Michôd’s followup to the brutish family drama Animal Kingdom, is a post-apocalyptic Western from the Outback, a stretch of land that already looks like the world’s been blown away. All Michôd needs to convince us of the devastation is a title card pegging the events…
Recently, Star Wars fans, along with much of the planet’s pop-culture collective, nearly ruptured the internet in their enthusiasm to share set-building photos from next year’s long-awaited new feature film. But these weren’t shots of just any set. They depicted the construction of the Millennium Falcon. You’ve never heard of…
A truly punk act, a shout of freedom, frustration, and exaltation, hits about halfway through Lukas Moodysson’s girl-punk reverie We Are the Best! The three thirteen-year-old protagonists, high on the idea of the three-chord band they’ve just started, find some damp garbage bags on the street that, they discover, are…
There’s much to be astonished by in the story of how the Supreme Court was goaded in slapping down Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban. One of the most surprising: that in courtroom after courtroom, be it state, district or superior, Charles Cooper and the proponents of the ban never…
Comedies about the battle of the sexes tend to have one clear loser: the audience. Driven by an oppositional view of romance that proved outmoded and seldom funny, Think Like a Man introduced us to six men living in Los Angeles and their corresponding flames. Some of these entanglements were…
Denver’s PechaKucha community, which puts on high-energy, lightning-fast slide shows with local creatives, likes to take to the streets when the weather gets nice. “Most of our summer PechaKuchas are outdoors, when the weather is great and we can get a big audience,” says spokeswoman Martha Weidmann. “Having them outside…
Although considered by many to be a hip-hop producer, Steven Ellison has displayed musical and artistic ambitions that are clearly not confined to a narrow range of classification. Drawing inspiration from the late hip-hop genius J Dilla, Ellison, under the moniker Flying Lotus, has likewise brought considerable imagination and a…
Give Of Montreal’s back catalogue even a casual listen and you’ll find a little bit of everything — glam rock, disco, psychedelia and pure pop — sometimes all crammed into the same song. The band’s main man, Kevin Barnes, is a complex and contradictory figure, creating everything from obscure characters,…
Out in the open is the place to be on pleasant summer nights, and that’s where you’ll be seated for tonight’s performance at the Arvada Center amphitheater by Denver’s Wonderbound dance company. In a program called Memories, choreographer Garrett Ammon and the troupe will explore themes of Jewish life and…
Denver has an impressive collection of public art — and tonight, some of those pieces will be in the spotlight during the Twilight Bike Tour, a two-wheeled spin around the city put on by Denver Arts & Venues. “We have a handful of pieces in the city that have a…
Blow off all other obligations and hit the streets for the eleventh annual Go Skateboarding Day. Skateboarding is for everyone, age, gender and skill level notwithstanding, and today’s unofficial holiday will celebrate the sport. Expect huge crowds at the Denver and Arvada skate parks, where local skate companies will be…
Your new favorite band is from Denver — you just have to find it! No small task in a city with thousands of artists and hundreds of venues, we know — but you can start this weekend at the Westword Music Showcase. More than 140 of our favorite local artists…
